The Better-Than List for 2013

The false politics of film culture 2013 (films exploiting race, class, sexual politics) paralleled the continued diminishment of cinephilia that has subordinated movies to TV, shifting cinema from a popular art form into political soccer games for media’s power elite. Lots of good film but also lots of not-so-hidden-agendas without depth, imagination or feeling. Values from the humanities persist yet struggle for attention over narcissism, nihilism, greed and retrograde esthetics. Only adventurous moviegoers saw the best films, everyone else saw hype. After a year of gross offenses and deep beauty, the Better-Than List knows the difference.

The We and the I> Short Term 12

Michel Gondry’s inventory of basic youth experience (a bildungsroman on wheels) cut through Destin Cretton’s patronizing, maudlin sociology. Gondry’s nearly miraculous feat, as good-natured as it was sensitive and inventive, may be the best film ever made about America by a non-American. A triumph of universality, plus the most profound, insightful, democratic title in years.

Michael Bay satirizes American ambition in imagery so bright and exhilarating it exposes the core of spiritual dislocation and rot that Scorsese turns into another self-pleased, overlong gangster epic.

Neil Jordan’s ultimate pop-genre revue chose life, unleashing the power of femininity upon its restrictions in British literary and social tradition while Spike Jonze dehumanized femininity–and love–as a po-mo joke.

Bullet to the Head > Mud

Walter Hill’s dynamic comeback further analyzed masculinity but in fresh New Millennium context while Jeff Nichols fell further back with ersatz corn-pone juvenilia, the year’s sorriest American movie.

American Hustle > August: Osage Country, The Place Beyond the Pines

David O. Russell’s acting class throwdown shows America to itself as a 70s costume party more exuberant and perceptive than dysfunctional clichés from derivative Broadway product and uninspired Sundance-indie formula made only to collect prizes.

Penny Lane’s remarkable act of documentary compassion (using home-movie proof that Watergate was the result of people as human as us) was deliberately misread as more character assassination while Sarah Polley egotistically exploited trite family history.

Binoche, Sukowa, Arterton, Adams, Lawrence, Collette gave a year of revelatory female performances through inspired auteurs, all ignored for Cate Blanchett’s dreadful, facetious embodiment of another foul Woody Allen conceit. The problem with contemporary film culture–in skirts.